Authors: Iain Banks
We used to celebrate Mum and Dad’s birthdays at the deeply wonderful Peat Inn, not too far away from us, near St Andrew’s, but my mum’s a bit frail these days and doesn’t like to stay away overnight anymore, so – being a lot closer – it looks like the Champanay has kind of inherited the dubious honour of hosting parental hoo-has. The fact they have Grange on the wine list certainly doesn’t count against the place either.
Like the Peat Inn, the Champanay is a restaurant with rooms. The relatively recent accommodation section is built on top of the wine cellar, which I got to visit once and is what my idea of Heaven would look like if it didn’t have windows. And if I wasn’t an atheist.
The Champanay’s main dining room is housed in an impressively appointed octagonal mill house. Like the less formal Chop and Ale house next door, it majors on steaks that are hung for three weeks in an ionised chill room. In the main bit there’s a proper restaurant pool with darkly lurking lobsters of various sizes, their claws peace-bonded by rubber bands. Altogether not a place for vegetarians of a delicate disposition.
We eat wonderfully (apart from me; I habitually use my fork upside down for peas, but there you are) and drink accordingly. We have Cullen Skink – spelled correctly – cream of parsley soup, scallops and cold smoked salmon to start, washed down with some Chassagne Montrachet, then rib-eye steaks, fried cod and more scallops for main courses, with a bottle of ’91 Grange and a delicious ’90 Nederburg Eminence to finish.
Now then. Grange.
How
much? Nested digressions around Aussie wine
.
Penfold’s Grange Bin 95, as it used to be called, is red wine made from the shiraz or syrah grape – in the past usually with variable though generally small amounts of cabernet sauvignon added – from southern Australia, specifically from near Adelaide. This is my favourite wine, and trust me I’ve tried a few. Ann’s favourite is the even more gulpingly expensive Pétrus from Bordeaux, but I just don’t get it with Pétrus, or any of the other fine French wines I’ve sampled over the years in my valiant attempts to find one that surpasses Grange. They may well all be great, but Grange is, for me, just in another league; I am simply in love with its fruitily unplumbable depths. That subjectivity thing, I guess.
Ann and I first tasted the stuff in a brilliant little restaurant
called
Floodlite in Masham, Yorkshire. Masham is the spiritual home of Theakston’s Old Peculier, the lunatic broth of Yorkshire, the famed and – at the time – idiotically strong real ale of sweet, chewy darkness and sudsy strength. Ann and I’s first date, back in London in 1980, involved Old Peculier. We went after work from Denton Hall and Burgin’s offices on High Holborn to the Sun on Lamb’s Conduit Street. I’d heard it was a good real-ale pub and had wanted to check it out for a while. I was confident this attractive blonde secretary I’d invited for a drink would be on the Bacardi and Cokes, but at least I could have a decent pint.
‘Oh, they do Old Peculier,’ I said as we approached the bar and I saw the sign on the tap. ‘I know what I’m having.’
‘So do I,’ said Ann.
‘So, what’ll it be?’
‘A pint of Old Peculier,’ she said, indignant at not having been understood.
‘What, really?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Brilliant.’
It was not brilliant, it was embarrassing. We drank and drank and I ran out of money and had to borrow a fiver off Ann, which has never been a cool thing to do on a first date. Plus she drank me under the table. We had a pint of Sam Smith’s down on the Strand and I saw her onto a bus home, then I somehow got myself back to McCartney’s flat, where I was staying while I looked for a place of my own. I lay on the floor and told a bemused Dave I had just met this wonderful girl who liked a drink as much as me! Hurrah!
Some of this was Les McFarlane’s fault (I imagine you’d already guessed that). He’d been to Tadcaster in Yorkshire on a field trip with his Economics class from Paisley College. some years earlier and had come back enthusing about this wonderful beer called Theakston’s Old Peculier. We discovered that you could buy this strange, darkly powerful ale of insanity in Glasgow, and became its apostles. A bunch of us had gone on a pilgrimage to Masham, taking in York and Castle Howard en route. Later a contingent of us London-living
Scots
would meet Les and a few other Scotland-based pals halfway, in York, again to sample the delights of Masham’s finest product.
Well, things change; we went back to Lamb’s Conduit Street a few years ago on one of our infrequent trips to London, but the Sun was no longer the mazily eccentric real-ale nirvana it had been back in the early eighties; just another pleasant, open, sensibly laid out café-like bar with too many alcopops and flavoured vodkas. And OP isn’t what it was either, changed long ago into a less powerful formulation and made in Carlisle, not Masham; still a fine beer, but not the mad, bad, brilliant stuff of near hallucinogenic power it once was. One of the Theakston family fell out with the others and started brewing another beer, back in Masham. You could tell he’d fallen out with the rest of the family because he called this new real ale Black Sheep (itself a fine pint, but no Old P.).
Masham, on the other hand, seems only to have changed for the better. The first couple of times I went it felt a bit too quiet and sleepy; now it appears more lively, without being exactly frenetic (though it positively bustles on market day). Set in beautiful rolling Yorkshire scenery Masham is full of Good Things, like the White Bear Inn (which appears to have some connection to Jethro Tull, a band I still have a real soft spot for), several other great pubs, the old brewery, the King’s Head Hotel, not one but two brilliant delicatessen/sweet shops, some interesting craft outlets, the wide central square where the market still takes place, and the Floodlite restaurant. Which brings us back to that first bottle of Grange.
In 1995 I decided Ann and I ought to start a new tradition of going to Masham every April, as close as possible to the anniversary of that first date, to drink at least one pint of Old Peculier. The first time we went we stayed at the King’s Head Hotel and on the second night ate out, at the Floodlite, which was one of those instant finds, where you immediately know you’ve stumbled on to something special; just amazingly good food. Plus it had a bottle of Ozzie plonk on the wine list for 75 quid. I’d decided a few years earlier that I was a real fan
of
the way Australian wine tasted in general compared to most French reds, plus I’d just had a royalty cheque and was therefore feeling relatively flush, so, though I’d never heard of this Penfolds Grange Bin 95, I stopped and thought about it.
I remember thinking that 75 was an awful lot of money to spend on a red that wasn’t a Bordeaux, but I felt kind of encouraged by the quality of the food in Floodlite and the fact that everything else on the menu and the wine list seemed reasonably priced; maybe this 1989 Bin 95 stuff was entirely worth the money. So we ordered a bottle. It became my favourite wine from the first mouthful.
I started looking out for it. I began, when we were going posh, to choose restaurants largely according to whether they had Grange on the wine list or not (so that, in London, Quo Vadis and then the Oak Room became favoured hang-outs in succession). I even started making notes about Grange; where we tasted it, what vintage it was and how much it cost. I never quite got round to the more esoteric business of rating it for taste, though I think I was on the brink of that before deciding it was all starting to get out of hand. It’s thanks to this now discontinued practice that I know the next two bottles we tasted after the Floodlite were an ‘87 at Sharrow Bay in the Lake District and a 1990 at Inverlochy Castle, outside Fort William.
So I’d like to thank Les, Yorkshire, Masham, the Theakston family, the Floodlite restaurant, the Sun on Lamb’s Conduit Street, London, in its early-eighties real-ale period, my automobile’s feng shui consultant, both my eyebrow stylists, my dog’s therapist …
On our return from the Champanay, heading back the few miles to the Forth Road Bridge in a people carrier taxi, we suddenly plough through a drift of whiteness in a little dip in the road. The fields for about 50 metres on either side shine in the moonlight, covered with – we work out after some confusion – hailstones. Otherwise the night is quite mild and the countryside as dark as it ought to be at this time of night and year. We have to check with the taxi driver that we’re really seeing what we seem to be. More weird weather.
Back home, Ann, Dad and I attack the stash of single malts under the stairs. I believe it’s this night that sees the end of the 60 per cent Talisker.
I think it’s how it would have wanted to go.
A week later, after an afternoon’s retail therapy in Inverness, Ann and I make for the pointy pink confection that is the Bunchrew Hotel. We bump into a guy we met on Islay years ago, when we went to Crowcon, a microcon of people who’d got together over the net on a newsgroup discussing my books (hence the ‘Crow’ bit). One of the group happened to live on Islay and have a connection with Ardbeg distillery, which is why I’d already been there before the research for this book.
Another fine meal – I can feel my belt crying out for a new hole to be cut even as I look at the sweet menu – and we finally have a French wine that does taste quite like the glorious Grange! Les has been banging on for years about how Grange used to be called Grange Hermitage because it was the taste of Hermitage that Penfold’s was trying to emulate, and I’ve been trying to track down an Hermitage that fits the bill all this time. At last; a Jaboulet Hermitage ’93.
During the meal we get talking with a very nice couple from Florida called John and Tina. In the bar I try to persuade John that his Macallan will taste better with just water rather than the soda he’s adding, using a Macallan Gran Reserva to do the proving. He’s polite but obviously unconvinced. Ah well. Happily we manage to stay off politics; crudely statistically there’s less than a one in four chance any randomly encountered American will actually have voted for Dubya, but you never know, and in a convivial atmosphere it’s usually best to avoid unpleasantness. And they do refer to the word Goddamn as “Gee Dee”, which is sort of charming while being infinitely worrying at the same time. I promise to send an SF book to Tina, and they insist if we’re ever in Florida we must visit them. I manage to keep my trap shut about the passport thing.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, after eleven protesters are shot and killed by the US forces in the town of Falluja, the townspeople stage
a
protest over the killings. So the Americans kill two of those protesters too.
Meanwhile two British Moslem guys who’ve flown out to Israel become our first home-grown suicide bombers.
Amazingly, still no Weapons of Mass Destruction …
The Bunchrew suffers an atypical power cut just in time for breakfast the following morning so we head off into one more gloriously clear and sunny day, heading north towards Wick via Beauly, Muir of Ord and Brora, where we stop to have a look round Clynelish distillery.
I know this road well; the first bit from the days of driving to and from Nigg Bay and Portmahomack, and the sections north of Tain from driving to Thurso for the ferry to Orkney, where Ann’s eldest sister Jenny and her husband James live. There are a lot of good long straights up to Tain but the road as ever is fairly busy in both directions and it isn’t until after Tain that the traffic thins and the road offers up its wonderfulness.
These days, passing the Cromarty Firth, I count the drilling rigs sitting out on the water. This is a Bill Drummond thing. Bill Drummond was one of the band called KLF back in the eighties and also part of the K Foundation, the guys who burned a million quid on Islay (it would have been hopelessly uncool, while I was on Islay the month before, to have sought out the place where they performed the burning, so I didn’t). Drummond’s a fascinating character and my pal Gary Lloyd has been something of a fan for a long time. He gave me a present of one of Drummond’s books,
How To Be An Artist
, which involves the man, back in 1998, driving his Land Rover Defender (ha!) from southern England to Dounreay nuclear power station, on the north coast of Scotland, stopping every now and again to take pictures of a sign that says ‘FOR SALE, A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind. Richard Long. $20,000’ (long story – read the book). In this he mentions counting the rigs on the Cromarty Firth as he passes by on the A9. So I do this as well, such conduct counting as a sufficiently mild symptom of fan-boy homage
behaviour
not to be too embarrassing to mention in a book like this one, obviously.
When we first started making this journey, once past Tain you still had to go round the Dornoch Firth, only crossing the river at Bonar Bridge, but nowadays a long low bridge sweeps over the sand and waves from just past the Glenmorangie distillery. The local communities were very proud about getting this new bridge; they sponsored a series of events to celebrate its opening, one of which I was involved in (if I recall correctly I was invited because I wrote a book called
The Bridge
. I wonder if I wrote a novel called
The New Ferrari
…? Na, forget it). The road contains a good mix of straights and twists thereafter before the town of Golspie, followed a few miles later by Brora. Just outside Golspie is Dunrobin Castle, a slightly bizarre if undeniably dramatic construction with an arguably inappropriate amount of Loire châteaux about it, even for the locally mild climate of this eastern coast. The place also has unfortunate associations with the worst excesses of the Clearances, when the crofters – the small-scale farmers of the Highlands and Islands – were driven off their lands at gunpoint and their homes torched to make way for sheep and cattle. So, like Culloden, it remains a place I’m waiting to be in the right mood to visit.
Clynelish is, anyway, sort of a start.
The original Clynelish distillery was built in 1819 at the instigation of the Marquis of Stafford, who was later to become the First Duke of Sutherland. There was a lot of illicit distilling in the area and the Marquis apparently felt that it was much to be preferred that he invest in a licence and satisfy the local demand – and make a tidy profit out of it – rather than have the local crofters flout the law of the land and scrape together a few extra pennies. 1819 was a busy year for the Sutherlands; while the distillery was going up, so were 250 crofts, in flames, the better to persuade their inhabitants of the desirability of cattle-farming as opposed to, say, feeding their families.